BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

Washington Post Review of this Best-Selling New Book by the Man at the Center of the Words of the JFK Era, Ted Sorenson:

There will never be another speechwriter like Ted Sorensen, if only because there will never be a relationship like the one between Sorensen and John F. Kennedy. Staffs have mushroomed along with expectations that presidents will speak more or less incessantly, on all subjects, from Earth Days to birthdays. Burnout sets in earlier, and few writers stay with a politician for anything like the length of time Sorensen worked for Kennedy, from January 1953 to Nov. 22, 1963. Arguably, he has never stopped working for him.

From the beginning they were an unlikely couple. JFK was infinitely urbane, cool before the word went mainstream. Sorensen was stress personified, a teetotaling taskmaster, admittedly unlikable in his single-minded dedication. But they shared certain qualities, ranging from impatience with the old order to respect for history and passion for words. If no other speechwriter ever had Sorensen's access, then it is probably also true that no politician ever benefited more from his wordsmith's talents than Kennedy did. Nothing in recent memory compares to the body of work that Sorensen and Kennedy authored collaboratively, from Profiles in Courage through the 1960 Democratic Convention ("We stand at the edge of a New Frontier") to the 1961 inaugural ("Ask not what your country can do for you") and the triad of memorable orations (at American University, to the nation on civil rights, and to a crowd in Berlin) from a single month, June 1963.

Sorensen was one of the youngest of the New Frontiersmen; 45 years later, he is almost the last survivor, nearly blinded by a stroke in 2001 but still bearing witness at 80. Sorensen has written on Kennedy before -- his 1965 opus, Kennedy, was one of the first to etch the legend into stone, and he has been writing ever since on subjects ranging from foreign policy to table tennis. (He even tried to take over this newspaper once, an episode recounted in Katharine Graham's memoir, Personal History.) But this book is different from his previous efforts. It is as much about Sorensen as Kennedy, more personal than anything he has written before. It is full of new information about both men, and in a world saturated with Kennedy stories both over-familiar and apocryphal, that's saying something.

Sorensen was born in 1928, already surrounded by presidents. His father named him after Theodore Roosevelt; he was born on Harry Truman's 44th birthday; and he arrived in the Nebraska city named after Abraham Lincoln. It was a provincial enough place that it called itself "the Hartford of the West." But he grew up in an idealistic home, the son of a crusading state attorney general and a Jewish mother whose family had emigrated from Russia (and whose battle with mental illness he movingly describes). Far from Harvard and all things Kennedy, Sorensen began to discover his facility with language. In one amusing scene from his teenage years, he escaped a beating by dazzling a thug with his oratory. Like Cyrano de Bergerac, he found he had a talent for the peculiar form of not quite self-expression that is speechwriting. (Indeed, he is so naturally alliterative that this sentence appears in the book without irony: "Public officials should be judged primarily not by their puritanism in private, but by their public deeds and public service, by their principles and policies.")

He arrived in Washington in 1951, never having written a check or drunk a cup of coffee. The gleaming capital quickly educated him in those sins and others, but it also handed him the opportunity of a lifetime when he joined the staff of an up-and-coming Massachusetts politician, newly elected to the Senate. From that moment until the last time he saw Kennedy (handing the president a folder on "Texas Humor" as JFK walked to a helicopter to begin his trip to Dallas), the two men were drawn together by fate and a natural symbiosis.

What a time! As Sorensen argues persuasively, the New Frontier was a triumph of literacy as well as glamour. Words and their occasional companions, facts, were essential to it. Even if the Kennedy administration was slow in some areas (such as civil rights), it took a conservative nation quite a bit down the progressive road during its 1,000 days.

This book is instantly essential for any student of the period. It fills gaps in the historical record; it vividly conveys life inside the administration; and it generously dishes anecdotes (at one point, JFK calls for help after lighting a fire in a fake fireplace in the Oval Office). Like all White Houses, Kennedy's had its animosities, and as Sorensen argues, it was no Camelot. Jackie Kennedy disliked Lyndon Johnson enough to call him "Colonel Cornpone." Political adviser Kenny O'Donnell hated Sorensen, a fact that Sorensen learned only by reading materials that came out long after the fact.

Review by Ted Widmer


BUZZFLASH REVIEWS